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12/11/2013

Another Obamacare disaster: Insurance plans under Obamacare won't cover care at top hospitals

Guess what the very sickest patients tend to go to university hospitals. These hospitals have a relatively low success rate, but it is because of the difficult cases that they take, not because they do a bad job. If you were to have these patients instead go to other hospitals, the failure rate would be even higher. But Obamacare regulations define these hospitals as "inefficient" and prevent them from being covered by insurance plans. From the Financial Times:

Experts say the move by insurers to limit consumers’ choices and steer them away from hospitals that are considered too expensive, or even “inefficient”, reflects the new competitive landscape in the insurance industry since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s 2010 healthcare law.

It could become another source of political controversy for the Obama administration next year, when the plans take effect. Frustrated consumers could then begin to realise what is not always evident when buying a product as complicated as healthcare insurance: that their new plans do not cover many facilities or doctors “in network”. In other words, the facilities and doctors are not among the list of approved providers in a certain plan. . . .

A couple of years with these regulations could really damage these top quality medical care providers.